Working with Groups of Tenants Using Tags

This page describes how to use tenant tags to make working with tenanted deployments in Octopus much easier.

Classifying and Working with Groups of Tenants

Working with a small number of tenants is quite easy, they all fit on one page, and you can tailor deployments for your projects and environments based in individual tenants. Working with a lot of tenants (we hope all of our customers are this successful!) is much harder if you try to tailor everything based on individual tenants. This is where it makes sense to work with tenants in aggregate, just like environments and target roles let you work with machines in aggregate instead of individually.

Consider the example of setting up new infrastructure as a shared host for multiple tenants: Instead of specifying each tenant by their name, you could tag each tenant as belonging to a shared pool, and add that single tag to each deployment target in the pool. You can jump ahead in our guide if this is of interest to you.

In the example above we are configuring a single deployment target for each tenant individually - what a headache!

In the example above we are configuring a single deployment target for a group of tenants using a single tag - what a dream!

Introducing Tenant Tags

In Octopus, tenant tags help you to classify your tenants using custom tags that meet your needs, and tailor tenanted deployments for your projects and environments. You can read more about tenant tags in our reference documentation, or jump to other sections in this guide to learn about tailoring your projects and environments for your tenants:

Example Scenario: Treating VIP Tenants with Extra Care and Attention

Let's walk through an example of classifying our tenants by some measure of importance which will help us group our tenants, and find them more easily.

Step 1: Create a tag set and tags.

Step 2: Tag your existing tenant.

Step 3: Tailor the deployment process for VIP tenants.

Step 4: Deploy the project to your VIP tenant.

Step 5: Create and tag some more tenants to see the results.

Step 1: Create a Tag Set and Tags

Let's create a tag set called Tenant importance with some tags that represent different reasons why we might treat one tenant differently to others.

Go to Library ➜ Tenant Tag Sets.

Create a tag set called Tenant importance with the description:
Allows you to have different customers that we should pay more or less attention to.

Now add some tags to your tag set using these examples as a guide.

Name

Description

Color

VIP

Very important tenant - pay attention!

Dark Red

Standard

These are our standard customers

Light Gray

Trial

These are trial customers

Purple

The result should look like the screen below:

Order is important for tag sets, and tags within those tag sets. Octopus will sort tag sets and tags based on the order you define in the library. This allows you to tailor the Octopus user interface to your own situation.

Step 2: Tag Your Existing Tenant

Let's tag your existing tenant to see how easy it is to work with tags.

The resulting deployment process will include the step that emails tenants tagged with the VIP tag.

Step 4: Deploy the Project to Your VIP Tenant

Now this new step in your deployment process will execute when deploying to VIP tenants, but not for any other tenants.

Step 5: Create and Tag Some More Tenants to See the Results

To really see the benefit of tagging you could go and create some more tenants and tag them. On the tenants page you can click SHOW ADVANCED FILTERS and view your tenants based on which tags have been applied to which tenants.